Partly
a hymn to Canada’s unrealized potential, partly a polemic against the politicians
who have betrayed those possibilities, B.W. Powe’s A Canada of Light strives
for emotional resonance at a time when just such a book - a sort of missal
for the true believer Powe believes resides in every Canadian breast -
should shine with relevance.

Confused
in its perception of technology, and hobbled by fuzzy notions of economics
and global statehood, A Canada of Light professes to strive for
a “dancer’s lightness of step, lightness opposed to heaviness or weight,
opposed to tragedy and gloom”, but fails to soar, fails to convince, and
fails to illuminate the most imperative facet of our amorphous national
“identity”: our relationship to the rest of the world.

Originally
published four years ago as A Tremendous Canada of Light, Powe has
brought out this new edition at what must be percieved as a crucial time:
the eve of a national election. “May each election and referendum continue
to shake us to our roots”, Powe implores in his conclusion, believing,
not unreasonably, that the “Canadian experiment” is more about process
than agreement, each crisis a provisional milestone in the history of a
country free of the weight of bloody history and reverent constitutionalism.

The earlier
edition was explicit in its choice of Brian Mulroney as the villainous
figurehead in this phase of our story. Four years later, Mulroney has left
the stage, but the threat persists: fiscal austerity, dismantling of the
social infrastructure, the unquestioned ascendancy of corporatism.

To this
end, Powe addresses the “corporate mindset”. He rues the meanness of the
contemporary political mind, observes with dismay the resemblance of our
most powerful politicians in character to middle-management number-crunchers,
and longs for the sentimental statesman: “We need anti-politicians,
as it were, who can contemplate and advocate the profound ambiguities and
ambivalences of our country.”

Powe tries
to preempt the derision such a statement invites by arguing that the corporatist
mindset promotes the “language of trade and markets over the language of
inspiration...so that people feel embarassed and uncomfortable when they
hear any argument that is not considered realistic.” That may be socially
accurate, but it overlooks the desperate need most Canadians, indeed most
citizens in any country today, feel for solutions to what seem like insurmountable
problems - in economics, in government, in the basis of civil society.
Powe acknowledges the problems, but seems to misunderstand the desperation.

“Economics
is about states of mind, about moods”, Powe writes. I would disagree. In
the modern era, economics has become theology. Powe accurately depicts
the distrust with which most Canadians view their elected representatives,
but inasmuch as few politicians anywhere in the world are valued for their
integrity, Powe’s observations are banal. Overwhelmingly, the west has
discarded any questions about the efficacy of laissez-faire capitalism
in the material life of a country and its citizens, at least for the moment.

The mood,
if such a thing is to be defined, at the end of this century, is of limited
options, pragmatism, and impatience with idealism. In a grimly secular
world, economics is a religion to which we dictate our limited needs, but
hardly a dictator, of moods or anything else.

Powe’s
grasp of technology also seems inconsistent. While on one hand his “Canada
of light” is borne aloft in electromagnetic waves, bound together by communication
technology, its corporate nemesis consists of “minds mesmerized by screens
and numbers, by reams of statistics and the flash of computer speed, the
electrons and digits of the pulsing 1s and 0s.” He denounces the “virtual
models” that informed the budgets of Tory finance minister Michael Wilson,
but celebrates a future Canada whose citizens live in a harmony made possible
by technological “virtuality”.

What Powe
seems to lack, like many Public Intellectuals dazzled by the phenomenon
of the Internet and Information Culture, is an understanding of who owns
the technology, who develops it and who profits from its use. What Powe
understands implicitly is the great paradox that forms, and confounds,
the question of Canadian identity: a nation defined by what many would
percieve to be a negative concept - solitude.

It’s an
idea that Glenn Gould explored poetically but unsentimentally, yet Powe
overestimates its potency. The idea of a country shaped by its vast, unpopulated,
unpeoplable distances, held together over great distances by fortuitous
technology, might be profound to an intellectual, but it offers little
solace to those unemployed in the hinterlands, to recent immigrants, or
to youth, who lack memory of a different kind of country, and who long
to feel part of a vital society. Inasmuch as emerging technology is more
solvent in character than binding, more atomising to the individual in
its thrall, I fear that technology might have forsaken not just Canada,
but every country without a stake in its distribution.

Not surprisingly,
the flaw in Powe’s argument begins in the title of his book, taken from
Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Bellow uses Canada
not as an object or place name but as a descriptive metaphor: “...and then
of abstraction, a tremendous Canada of light.” Like Bellow’s vision of
Canada, Powe’s argument is born of abstraction, and like most abstractions,
seems of little use in the face of the hard truths we, as a nation, face
now, and in an uncertain future, glimpsed more in darkness than light.